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276
JAINA YOGA
[CH.
ladder twice cannot climb up the ladder of annihilation in that life and so cannot attain emancipation in the same life. The soul which has climbed up the ladder of subsidence only once has the chance of climbing up the ladder of annihilation and thus attaining final emancipation in that very life.
The ladder of annihilation also is climbed up in almost the same way. Only the souls encased in a strong body can climb up this ladder. By the three processes the soul annihilates at the outset the four 'lifelong' passions. Then the three sub-types of the visiondeluding karman are annihilated. If the individual dies at this stage after the annihilation of the above seven sub-types of karman, it has to experience three or four more births before it attains emancipation.1 Otherwise, the soul proceeds further for the gradual annihilation, by means of the threefold processes, of the second and third types of passions, the nine quasi-passions, and the fourth type of anger, pride and deceit. Then last of all the soul annihilates the fourth type of greed and attains a state where all the sub-types of the deluding karman have been annihilated.2 This is the summit of the ladder of annihilation. The soul is now free from passions and immediately attains omniscience and reaches a stage which is known as the state of embodied freedom (jivanmukti).
With this background in mind, let us study the conception of the stages of spiritual development (gunasthāna).3 The soul passes through an infinite number of states while reaching from the lowest to the highest stage of spiritual development. These states have been classified into fourteen stages of spiritual development called gunasthānas. The lowest stage is the state of perversity of attitude towards truth (mithyadṛṣṭi-gunasthana). The soul has the minimum possible degree of right vision at this stage. It has only a very indistinct enlightenment, the minimum that the soul can have, and we have stated on more than one occasion why the soul cannot be absolutely bereft of the enlightenment. Even those souls which have cut the knot (granthi) and experienced the spiritual vision on account of the absolute suppression and subsidence (upasama) of the visiondeluding karman can fall down to this stage on the rise of the relevant karman. But such souls do not sink down to the depth where the souls which have not cut the knot exist. Next we come to the second stage called sasvadana-samyagdṛṣṭi. The soul does not pass on to the second stage from the first, but only halts at it while falling down from some higher stage of spiritual development. Thus if at the end
katitame bhave 1 Cf. athocyeta-kṣiņasaptako gatyantaram sankräman mokṣam upayati? ucyate-trtiye caturthe va bhave-Malayagiri's Tika on Kp: Upa, 32.
2 See Kg1, p. 74.
3 This study is based on Kg1, pp. 67-77
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